Critical rationalism

Popper wrote about critical rationalism in many works, including: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959),[1] The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[2] Conjectures and Refutations (1963),[3] Unended Quest (1976),[4] and The Myth of the Framework (1994).

Critical rationalism as a discourse positioned itself against what its proponents took to be epistemologically relativist philosophies, particularly post-modernist or sociological approaches to knowledge.

In this sense, critical rationalism turns the normal understanding of a traditional rationalist, and a realist, on its head.

The rationale behind this is simply to make it as easy as possible to find out whether the theory is false so that it can be replaced by one that is closer to the truth.

It is not meant as a concession to justificatory epistemology, like assuming a theory to be "justifiable" by asserting that it is highly unlikely and yet fits observation.

William Warren Bartley compared critical rationalism to the very general philosophical approach to knowledge which he called justificationism, the view that scientific theories can be justified.

Justificationism is what Popper called a "subjectivist" view of truth, in which the question of whether some statement is true is confused with the question of whether it can be justified (established, proven, verified, warranted, made well-founded, made reliable, grounded, supported, legitimated, based on evidence) in some way.

But they conclude (wrongly, according to the critical rationalist) that there is therefore no rationality, and no objective distinction to be made between the true and the false.

By dissolving justificationism itself, the critical rationalist (a proponent of non-justificationism)[8] regards knowledge and rationality, reason and science, as neither foundational nor infallible, but nevertheless does not think we must therefore all be relativists.

Argentine-Canadian philosopher of science Mario Bunge, who edited a book dedicated to Popper in 1964 that included a paper by Bartley,[12] appreciated critical rationalism but found it insufficient as a comprehensive philosophy of science,[13] so he built upon it (and many other ideas) to formulate his own account of scientific realism in his many publications.

Are all swans white? The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to "prove" such hypotheses or induce them from observational data. Such "proof" would require us to infer a general rule from a number of individual cases, which can have predictive use but is inadmissible by the rules of logic. However, if we find one single black swan, logic allows us to conclude that the statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of proving them.